Their paper flies in the face of current popular pedagogical 'wisdom' that suggests that nearly everything needs to be taught explicitly to students.
Specifically, they suggest that metacognitive strategies (supposedly designed to assist students with creating a deeper understanding of material) may actually be getting in the way of students' learning. They quote the experience of one middle school teacher who had encouraged students to pause at intervals during their reading to create visual associations:
After a few weeks, her students rebelled, and told her that "Metacognition was interfering with the reading zone ... (it) disrupted the flow of a great story; ate up precious hours that could have been devoted to living inside another great story, and wasted their time as readers ... not one student could name a positive effect of the strategies on his or her reading performance".
'Conventional wisdom' usually looks at tools that have the potential to be useful, and advance the implementation of these tools or strategies in day-to-day contexts. However, 'common sense' (which is possibly closer to 'enduring wisdom') might be worth considering when 'useful' tools and strategies are actually creating unnecessary detours from the simple enjoyment of learning. Sometimes spending too much time on the scaffolding may unnecessarily slow down the building process.
...some strategies are teachable and useful to learn. Others are less useful, limited only to conscious language learning and deliberate memorization. Still others, those that all humans naturally possess and use, may be counterproductive to teach.
Ref: Krashen and Brown (2007). STETS Language and Communication Review, Singapore Tertiary English Teachers Society.
